The Mediterranean and California coast have a moderate climate without extreme temperatures, 10-20C 55-70F year round.

Cities like Bogota, located in the mountains close to the equator, are sometimes referred as "city of eternal spring", with cooler 5-20C 45-65F year round.

Are there cities or areas that have stable winter-like weather year round? Somewhere around -5-10C 30-40F? Most Nordic cities seem to have seasonal climate.

Just a neat, theoretically-eternal circuit.

More details and a schematic

Experiences with the Matrix protocol, Matrix Synapse server, bridges, and Element mobile app. There are some you-just-have-to-know-this issues.

TL;DR:

• Matrix Synapse: works fine, but requires constant manual maintenance.
• Bridges: work pretty well.
• Element: generally OK, some issues with timely notifications, no feature parity between Element Classic and Element X, terrible on-boarding (with current setup)

Hi fellow self-hosters! Has anyone ran Element Server Suite or updated their existing Synapse to include Element Call? How many users do you have?

I have been running Matrix Synapse server on a 1 CPU 1 GB RAM VPS for about 5 years. Just a few close people and a WhatsApp bridge (also for just a few people who use that). It worked fairly well.

Now that Element took over many of the Matrix things, they are expanding the server architecture and bundling the server install as Element Server Suite. The Community Edition is said to be aimed at "small to mid-sized deployments (1–100 users)", but looking at the architecture and requirements... the setup requires Kubernetes (!), at least 2 CPUs and 2 GB RAM, a handful of services, each with their own sub-domain.

Is this corporatesque setup overkill for only a handful of users, or is this my inner Luddite talking? For comparison, Snikket (bundled XMPP server that provides very similar functionality) requires only 128MB RAM. Not sure if it's worth it trying to set up Element Call alongside existing Synapse, starting over with ESS, or going to Snikket.

Hi all!

Is it possible to prevent an Android device from providing power to a connected USB accessory? (I.e. I want the Android device to use USB/OTG devices, be charged by them, but never provide power to them)

The setup: I have a Lineage 21 / Android 14 device that is connected to a USB-C hub, which are all in a car. When USB hub has power, it acts as a host, charging the device, and everything is OK. But when USB hub loses power (car is turned off), Android device re-connects to the hub, but now Android device is powering the hub, which drains the battery very quickly.

What I want to achieve: When USB hub loses power, Android device acts as if the hub is entirely disconnected, enters sleep, and can be in sleep until it receives power again.

I did not find any straightforward solutions yet. Attempting to change USB setting for "powered by this device" did not work, nor did trying to write commands to some /sys/power files. My next thought is some form of an automatic hardware switch.

Maybe a strange question, but do you often have simultaneous opposing opinions on books or series that you read?

Not too long ago I read Peter Watts' Blindsight, and it has many thought-provoking ideas about conscience, the human brain, and alien life. Yet it is wrapped in a mediocre sci-fi action movie script that is difficult to follow and stops making sense toward the end. So I cannot say that I exactly liked or disliked it.

And just now, I finished Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch series, and it feels like books 2 and 3 (Ancillary Sword, Ancillary Mercy) are entirely separate story from book 1 (Ancillary Justice). The latter books are okay for what they are, but do not live up to the style, scale, and pace of the first book, and leave some of the concepts entirely unexplored. So once again, I cannot exactly say that I loved the series.

Any other books that left you with similar dual opinions?

A small project to help out anyone trying to keep their old devices functional.

I wrote a script to scrape pages of some popular alternative OS projects (such as postmarketOS and LineageOS), and put them into a single list. I'll try to automate and keep this up-to-date. Any additional OS suggestions and comments are welcome!